GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THE SCOPE OF ETHICS 149
question of the central problem of ethics, that philosophers
differ most Whereas the Greeks, for example, held that
the basic notion of ethics was good, or the Good, and
deduced, therefore, that the main problem of ethics
was to discover the Good, Kant and other eighteenth
century writers held that the bane notion of ethics was
that of moral obligation, and that the main problem of
ethics was to discover its ground or source.
(3) THAT IT is DIFFICULT TO KEEP ETHICAL QUESTIONS
DISTINCT. In spite of overlapping, the expositor is bound,
so far as he can, in the interests of clarity to treat the
various questions which I have mentioned as if they were
distinct He cannot, it is obvious, write about everything
at once, and even if in the end it is found that all the
questions which I have cited are different aspects or forms
of the same question, it is necessary to begin by treating
them as though they were separate questions. The neces-
sity will be apparent, if we take two ethical questions
which seem at first sight to be closely allied the question
of the meaning of a right action, and the question of
the standard to which we should refer when we want to
know whether a particular action is right. That the
question, "what do we mean by calling an action right? "
is different from the question, "how do we come to know
1
or recognize that an action is right? ', that the question of
ning is, in other words, different from that of standard
or criterion, can be shown by the following example: Let
us consider the proposition "the train leaves King's
Cross at 10 a.m. for Edinburgh," which proposition we
will assume to be true. Then the meaning of the proposition
is that there is a complex, physical fact which
the sentence used in the enunciation of the proposition
expresses. The complex, physical feet is one that we may
loosely describe by saying that a railway engine with
carriages attached to it begins at a certain point of time
to alter its position in space, although the complete descrip-
tion of all that we mean when we enunciate this proposition